


Looking for a Sign

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Americana, Demon Blood Aftermath, Gen, Post-Season/Series 04, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:28:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25305268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Sometimes you wonder where you are. Not, like, geographically. It’s not hard to look out the window and guess. You pass highway signs and road markers. You know that you’re somewhere on the East Coast, that you passed Pennsylvania a while back, that the hot air outside the car smells like dry grass and cows as you drive by.You know the route you’re driving will eventually take you past the coast, the smell of salt air and nothing but aching blue as far as the eye can see.It's kind of a ghost story.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 14
Kudos: 34





	Looking for a Sign

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a desire to make a story out of [this tweet](https://twitter.com/a_long_drive/status/1282666426642436096) by @a_long_drive, my favorite road trip bot, and turned into a way to work through my feelings about the end of season 4. I don't think I've even begun to unearth all those feelings, but it's certainly a start.
> 
> I haven't seen season 5 yet, so this is very likely canon divergence.

Sometimes you wonder where you are. Not, like, geographically. It’s not hard to look out the window and guess. You pass highway signs and road markers. You know that you’re somewhere on the East Coast, that you passed Pennsylvania a while back, that the hot air outside the car smells like dry grass and cows as you drive by.

You know the route you’re driving will eventually take you past the coast, the smell of salt air and nothing but aching blue as far as the eye can see.

Something about growing up in a car—you and Dean are something of billboard connoisseurs. You pass nothing but billboards all day when you travel that way, mile after mile. Some places, billboards are the only thing that breaks up the monotony of the landscape, keeping you from stalking down roads in your head that you’d rather not go to. You start to pick your favorites. In some places, they almost start to seem like friends.

* * *

Sam and Dean are driving through Siler City. It’s hot as balls outside, and Sam’s clothes are stuck to his back with sweat. He wishes fervently for air conditioning. Sticks his head out the car like a dog when there’s no one on their right, slitting his eyes and letting the wind push through his hair while Dean slaps his leg and tells him to get back in the car.

He does, but he takes his time about it. The billboards out here are nothing much to look at, big green signs advertising $5 footlongs and lipstick-red posters promising fried chicken. Sam is wind-flushed by the time he sits back down, his hair sticking around his face at crazy angles.

“You get taken out by a passing car, I am not bringing you back, dude. Fucking embarrassing way to go out.”

Sam chuckles to himself, and Dean shakes his head, cranking the stereo loud enough that the music presses in on Sam’s ears, surrounding him on all sides. It’d feel like suffocation if he hadn’t grown up on it, a wall of sound getting ever closer, squeezing him tight and pushing his own thoughts out of his head. As it is, it just feels like an embrace. How he imagines hugs must have felt to other children—the ones who got chicken noodle soup when they were sick, and things like homemade after school snacks. He and Dean just got told to walk it off.

They might have had that, but he gets to have this.

He leans toward the window again but keeps his head in the cab this time. The whipping wind makes his eyes feel clean, cold and gritty and somehow bleached new.

* * *

Some places have the weird billboards, and those are his all-time favorites. Spotting the unsettling advertisement for some cult, the pet project put up by some whackjob with too much money—it’s like winning the road trip lottery.

He sees a good one outside Greensboro. It’s got a very 90s vibe, a fire and ice thing, with the words WHERE ARE YOU GOING? emblazoned over the top in white bubble font. The words HEAVEN and HELL sit across from each other on opposite sides of the poster, looking down on them from on high, and Sam laughs with a mouth full of sharp, white teeth.

Dean glances over to see what’s so funny, and he shakes his head and scowls when he sees the sign. “Been there, done that,” he mutters. “Got the t-shirt; do not recommend.”

It’s funny, Sam thinks, the things people’ll spend their money on. Cartoon signs and neon lights, like any of it will save them.

* * *

“Did you know there are no billboards in Hawaii?” Dean asks one day.

They’re cruising down the I-50, and Sam has no idea where they are. It all fades into a blur of rest stops and convenience stores and stopping for gas every couple days. They were in Kentucky two days ago. Now they’re somewhere dry and green and flat. Everything smells like cut grass.

“I didn’t know that,” Sam replies, only half paying attention. “I guess it’s not paradise if there are ads everywhere asking you to buy stuff?”

Dean shrugs. “Don’t know that it would bother me any. No billboards. I don’t know, man. It just sounds weird. Kind of eerie, you know?” He flexes his fingers on the steering wheel.

“I guess,” Sam says, ripping open their last packet of beef jerky.

The sign they pass says  _ LAST REST AREA FOR 200 MILES. _

* * *

Certain parts of the continental U.S. kind of remind him of hell. There’s a certain kind of desolation that feels familiar. He feels it in Oakland, where the sea and sky and structures are all the exact same shade of grey. It bleaches the life out of him, like a slowly sucking vortex. He finds it hard to shake off, no matter how many redwoods they pass. No matter how green the median strips and little sidewalk micro-parks.

“Sam? Hey, Sammy. Earth to Sammy.”

Sam looks at Dean, eyes taking a moment to focus on his face. For a second, it’s all a blur. Dean’s wearing a pinched expression that tells Sam it wasn’t the first time Dean tried to call him. Probably wasn’t even the third.

“Sorry, just zoned out for a second there. What’s up?”

“I’m going to hit some of these addresses, figure out what people know about our dead vic. You wanna come?”

Sam scrubs a hand over his face. Even the sunlight leaking in from behind the dusty curtain seems grey. Everything smells like smoke. “Nah. No, I’m good. I think I’ll do some research here. I want to see if I can find the deed to that house.”

“Fine.” Dean’s already grabbing his coat, sliding the gun into his waistband, grabbing the keys from the nightstand. He pauses in the doorway. He looks unsettled, unhappy and uncomfortable. “Hey, Sammy, you’re… are you okay? You’ve been sleeping and everything?”

_ Those are two different questions, _ Sam thinks. He’s kind of okay. Hasn’t really been sleeping.

The idea of parsing it into an answer that’s both satisfying and true sounds exhausting, so he just smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m great.”

“Okay. Hey, let’s order some pizza tonight. That place, Zachary’s, is supposed to be great.”

“Sure,” Sam says, already turned back to his research, fingers clicking away on the keys.

* * *

The weirdest billboard pops up on the outskirts of an honest-to-god ghost town. They’re right on the border of Nevada, Oakland far in their rearview. Everything is sandy beige, nothing but desert and yellow grass for miles. Bodie, California. Population: 0

Dean calls it a tourist trap. Sam calls it historic. He’d skimmed the pamphlets they’d found in the lobby of their hotel in Willow Springs. If there are ghosts here, they aren’t restless. He wonders if ghosts are happier when they get to keep to themselves. He wonders what they talk about.

Their EMF meter is quiet as they slow roll through desolate streets. Wooden buildings stick up like matchsticks against the sky. Sam thinks about how easily it would all go up like tinder.

The billboard they pass—if you could even call it that—is smaller than he’s used to. It’s hand-painted in shaky letters, in a shade of russet orange that might have been handsome before the desert sun had its way with it. The sign is propped up against a handmade frame weighted down with sandbags, tilted so that it faces the road. It’s dark out here, no street lamps in sight, so Sam can only read it for the barest second when the Impala’s headlights flash over it.

_ DO NOT STOP FOR LIGHTS. THEY ARE NOT POLICE. _

Sam feels a faint shiver travel up the back of his neck and wonders what that’s about. They drive past the old mining town, Dean humming along to the song on the radio and tapping his foot in time.

Sam reaches over and flicks off the music, and Dean shoots him a look of pure annoyance, already reaching for the dial.

“Sam, come on—”

Sam shakes his head. Puts his hand over Dean’s, just a brief touch that nevertheless stops him in his tracks, waiting. “No, just. Wait. Please.”

He can feel Dean’s eyes slanting over him, a calculating once-over as familiar to him as breathing, before he slides them back to the road.

“Fine,” Dean finally huffs, and they drive in silence.

Sam couldn’t say why the radio felt wrong—something about the night air turning Led Zeppelin’s lyrics plaintive and strange. It feels like a siren song for ghosts, the wail of decades-old pain pouring off cassette tapes into the arid night.

They drive on in silence, Sam drumming his fingers against the crevice of the open window. Every now and then, he checks in the distance for lights.

* * *

The Bridgeport Inn looks like something out of a novel about sailors. Signs out front promise BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, and BAR. Sam just wants a bed.

They’ve been driving for six consecutive days, catching catnaps in the front seat of the car, swapping turns at the wheel whenever one of them gets too tired to drive straight. Sam gives an enormous yawn that cracks his jaw. His eyes are swimming, his head a constant buzz of exhaustion that even caffeine can’t break through anymore. He tosses his Big Gulp cup in the trash can out front of the inn.

Dean gets them a room while Sam stands behind him, blearily blinking and barely paying attention. Some light muzak is playing in the lobby. There are dark green armchairs with curved spines that look like they’ve seen better days. They remind him of pool tables, upholstered in crushed velvet worn threadbare and thin. The lights in the lobby are shitty and yellow, and Sam can’t tell if there are any dubious stains on the armchairs.

He glances over at Dean, who’s now arguing with the sleepy-looking receptionist. It looks like it’s going to take a while. He decides he doesn’t care all that much, suspicious stains or no. If he stands for much longer, he’s liable to hit the floor, and he slumps into one of the chairs with an exhausted huff.

Dusty pictures of sailboats on placid waters peer down on him from their frames. He doubts they’re made with real paint—probably cheap prints bought from some mass-marketing warehouse, wherever it is that all these motels get their decor. His delirious brain wonders if they coordinate it to get that uncanny uniformity coast to coast.

He was right though—novels about sailors.

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep—doesn’t think he’s  _ that _ tired, to sleep out in the open like this—but the next thing he knows is Dean’s hand on his shoulder, rousing him from the depths of black, dreamless nothing, going, “Come on, sleepy.”

“Wha—?” He blinks, disoriented and confused. Last thing he knew, they were on the 395, Dean beside him in the Impala. It takes a minute for everything to come back to him. Haunting. Road trip. Bridgeport. Motel.

In the time it takes for his brain to come back online, his eyes light on Dean. He relaxes long before he even knows where he is. Relaxes into it because it’s Dean. Dean’s right here, looking down at Sam with a cocked eyebrow and a hand extended, and if Dean’s here, then everything’s okay, no matter where  _ here _ is.

Sam grabs Dean’s arm and lets Dean haul him up.

He rises with a groan, and it feels like every vertebra in his back cracks.

“Jesus, Sasquatch, you doing okay there? I don’t need to get you a cane or anything do I? You sound like an old man.”

“Shut up.”

“No, seriously. Bet we could find you a nice old folks’ home, Bingo on Thursdays, prune juice in the afternoons. They’d feed you all the health food crap you like—I bet you’d love it.”

“You first,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. “Calling me an old man, you fucking geezer.”

“Hey, I can dig it. Bet I’d clean up with the nurses. Sponge baths, Sammy.” He waggles his eyebrows, and Sam snorts and shoves him.

“Gross, dude.”

Dean goes tipping into the wall of the narrow hallway, and he shoves Sam back in retaliation, grinning slow and sleepy. They make it all the way to their room that way, yawning and pushing and fighting to get in front—although neither of them wants to win if it means leaving the other behind.

It means that when they pile into the room, they do it all together, pouring into a door that’s barely wide enough to fit the two of them when they’re acting stupid like this. There’s only one bed, and there are  _ swans _ on top of it, thin hotel towels twisted into the shape of waterfowl, their long necks swooping to form a heart. Sam would laugh if he wasn’t so tired.

Sam looks to Dean, raising an eyebrow.

Dean scowls, tossing his bag on the ground. “Honeymoon suite. It was the only room they had, and I figured you didn’t want to rough it in the car another night.”

“Yeah, no, dude. Another night, and we’d have driven off the road for sure.” He tosses his bag on the ground and falls back onto the bed, shoes and all. He sprawls on his back and thinks this must be what heaven feels like, softness all around and heavy, heavy eyes that drag him down into sleep without his overactive brain’s say-so. Even his whirring thoughts have finally eased up, like a computer left to idle for so long that its screen goes dark.

“Speak for yourself,” Dean says, and Sam just hums.

Sleep has already got him, sucking him into its depths, and everything just feels so good. Even the air feels like warm water on his skin.

A dim, distant part of his brain that’s still online—the part that never really turns off, that scans for threats and sulfur and signs of intruders even while he’s this far gone; the part that’s attuned to Dean, first and foremost—hears the little rustles inside the room. He hears the soft  _ shhrk _ of one of the duffels being unzipped, the quiet whisper of salt shaken out of a canister.

He hears Dean’s jacket hit the floor and the heavy thuds of each of his shoes after it. The mattress jostles slightly as Dean’s weight is added to it, and Sam feels a tug at each of his feet—first one and then the other—gentle, gentle.

He groans softly at the feeling of freedom, his constricted toes finally released as Dean tosses Sam’s shoes on the floor to join his own.

“Your feet fucking reek,” Dean says, but he says it quietly, and Sam doesn’t manage more of a response than a sleepy crinkle of one of his toes.

It means thank you, and the quick squeeze Dean gives one of the soles of his feet means you’re welcome.

Dean must nudge him over to make enough room for himself on the bed—Sam sleeps like an octopus, all his limbs flailed out, and he knows it—but he’s already asleep, and he doesn’t even feel it.

* * *

Morning dawns bright, the color of butter through the slats of the blinds. Sam’s still tired when he wakes. The clock reads 9:47, which is as good as sleeping late, in their book. He stretches and knuckles the sleep out of his eyes with a fist.

Dean’s gone, and the room is quiet.

He lies flat on his back for a second, tracing the stucco on the ceiling with his eyes. There’s a water stain peeling out from one corner, spreading over the dingy white like spilled coffee. It’s quiet inside, no noise save the occasional hum from a car rushing by outside.

He’s in the shower when Dean gets back, washing a week’s worth of grime from his skin—everything that quick whore’s baths in rest stop bathrooms couldn’t wipe away. 

Sometimes he remembers being locked in the panic room—the claustrophobia, the blatant fear of being cuffed down—it didn’t really matter at that point that Dean had wrapped rags around the inside of the cuffs to save his tender skin. What’s one more drop of pain diluted in the ocean? He remembers the screams ripping their way out of him for hours, sometimes, on days when his throat gets dry.

He fills his mouth with the steaming hot water and spits it out. This hotel’s water heater is great.

It doesn’t matter what he remembers—not really. This is life, and he’s not going anywhere. It’s just that sometimes he remembers what Dean is capable of, what he’s capable of doing to Sam, and then he can’t get warm.

He gets out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his hips, and Dean’s there waiting with a paper cup of coffee and a smile.

* * *

The Bridgeport Inn looks small in the rearview, and Sam breathes a little easier when it’s gone.

* * *

They haven’t had a case in days, and their driving has taken on a kind of aimless, wandering quality. They stop in little towns, here and there. They pick up the local papers, scan through the obits. Sam drinks coffee from a handful of no-name diners.

He orders food to pick at, but it becomes clear after the third or fourth time that there’s just no hunger in him. Not the right kind, anyway. It’s not worth the wasted money, so after the fourth diner, he starts taking food off Dean’s plate.

Dean eyes him with pursed lips but says nothing. He lets Sam eat his fries, as much as he wants, and that’s how Sam knows things aren’t better between them. Things still aren’t okay.

None of the towns stay with them for longer than the amount of time it takes to shake the dirt off their feet. He wonders what Jesus has to say about that.

* * *

Somewhere outside Boulder, they pass a giant green billboard with the biggest joint either of them has ever seen plastered on it.

Dean laughs and laughs, and Sam catches it too, lips pulled up as they roll on by. Dean’s laugh has always been infectious.

Dean gets quiet all of a sudden and slants a look at Sam. The change in mood comes too quick, so he isn’t expecting it at all. There’s no time to chase the smile off his face, and he’s left frozen with it for an extra beat, alone like laughing too loud in a quiet church. His face collapses in another second, no scaffolding to support it.

Dean turns up the car radio, and they don’t say anything. Sam wonders if this’ll happen every time they pass an ad for prescription pills too. Wonders if he’s just the all-purpose junkie in the room. There’s a fight to be had here, if he wants to have it, but he’s just too tired. He hasn’t got more than a catnap in days.

He watches Dean until they hit Wyoming, but Dean doesn’t look back. He doesn’t even flinch, and eventually Sam grows bored.

He sighs and settles back in his seat, watching the plains speed by.

* * *

Sam doesn’t really pray anymore. He’s tried once or twice, but it’s not really the same now that he knows that assholes are listening in. There are no signs from heaven. Nothing but fading lights in the reflection of tempered glass.

It’s just another thing he mourns. Something he’s given away that he can’t take back.

There are so few things he’s ever been allowed to keep. A gun, his place in the passenger seat, his brother. That last one—he watches Dean when he drives, when he eats. Sometimes when he sleeps. It feels like stargazing.

Like looking at something bright and brilliant that’s already long gone.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
